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OCADU’s Diagrams of Power: All these maps and it’s still a bit lost

Maps, you’d think, deal in fact: Point A here, point B there, and (thanks, Waze) the path that tracks the shortest distance between the two. But really, maps are the most graphic illustration I can think of that facts depend on your point of view. Slapping down roads and drawing up boundaries is hardly a neutral act; depending on which side you fall, their divisions can be violently exclusive or just plain violent, full stop — ask people on either side of the border in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

As a closed system, maps may tell you where things are, but for the most part don’t reveal much about how they got that way. That perceived neutrality is a soft-pedalled deception. I think that’s what Diagrams of Power, the recently opened exhibition at OCAD University’s OnSite Gallery is getting at, though it’s a mixed bag that never really coheres.

That would be fine — art should leave a little room for personal departures — but for the lecture-like tone that pervades here. Diagrams of Power neither delivers on the esthetic or the poetic we reasonably expect of an art exhibition; but for a couple of notable tangents, it feels like an graduate seminar on social justice.

That’s a fine, and necessary, goal, but it’s only part of the picture. While it wears its politics on its sleeve — conspiracy theories of capitalist collusion with authoritarian states abound, as does a persistent narrative of exploitation of a global underclass, neither of which I’d dispute — Diagrams of Power feels, at times, to have checked its obligations as an exhibition at the door. Public institutions are at their best when they’re hosting important civic conversations, but this is a civics class more than an art exhibition. Those divisions are more fluid than they’ve ever been, and we’re broadly better for it. But if it’s moments of wonder you’re after, you’re in the wrong place. This show is work.

What Divisions of Power does do, not surprisingly, is heighten your sense of moral outrage at the manipulations of a global elite for their own benefit. Maps as neutral wayfinders are indeed a sham here: Bureau d’Etudes, a conceptual design studio in France, lays out its World Government 2013 as a vaguely circuit-board-like web of connections between U.S. trade policy, communications networks, an array of military and nuclear complexes and the food supply. With a literalist’s lack of imagination, it seems to nod at the vast, web-like conspiracy-theory drawings of the American artist Mark Lombardi, but without his urgency or absurdist charm. As an illustrated flow-chart of the 1 per cent, anyhow, I suppose it works.

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Literalism is on theme here: Nearby is The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a community effort in San Francisco’s Mission district to push back against a frenzy of gentrification there. An activist group started tracking legally specious no-fault evictions on a map, using its density to draw enough public attention to legally challenge landlords; the project, which became surprisingly effective at curbing those evictions, came to include a mural project in alleyways in the neighbourhood. As a pragmatic strategy, cartographic shaming seemed to work; let your mind wander, and you can see within this the seeds of larger, more nuanced project around the geography of privilege. But this is where The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project starts and ends.

Had it something more poetic to rub up against, broader connections might be made, and on a small screen beside it, Joshua Akers’ Property Praxis might have been it. An interactive map of Detroit cataloguing property speculators — those owning more than one property — it’s a tantalizing idea, though fantastically dry. I wondered why it had to be interactive at all, stifled by its cold matter-of-factness and void of esthetic prompts. Its inhumanity might be its point — communities broken down in geographic units, not human spaces — but it felt less revelatory than dull, a rough fate that too much important information suffers. The lack of interpretive frame — that’s where art comes in — leaves the work only to the data-savvy.

The same can’t be said of Forensic Architecture, whose project here maps an attack on Mexican students in Iguala in 2014 by police colluding with organized crime. It’s a wonder of 3D modelling: A convoy of five buses were commandeered by students to join a protest in Mexico City, which Forensic Architecture tracks block-by-block on a satellite map until their capture by police. As the camera drops to street level, we see cold, computer-rendered figures lying in the street.

Like Akers’ work, Forensic Architecture’s bloodless display is made for chillingly practical purpose: Six students were killed, 40 injured, and another 43 disappeared and remain missing; the project was made as a fine-detailed reconstruction of events on behalf of Mexican human-rights groups and the students’ families with the hope of moving indifferent-seeming investigators forward (in June, a Mexican high court ruled a truth commission must be struck to open the investigation anew).

It’s important work, no doubt — a totem of possibility on how publicly available records can spur clarity when public servants fail. But how does it fit, and does it matter? In the curator’s notes, it says that all the works here — data projects, computer models, the occasional artwork — all use mapping formats “to tell important stories that upset and resist the status quo.” That’s a noble goal, and true, I think, throughout. But I wonder if it’s a little loose for an exhibition that seems to want to lecture about how land dictates power (fair enough) and then seems to throw in a few artworks as an afterthought?

I found myself floundering to make connections, each piece an island vaguely related to another, and often not even by form. The show might have chosen “Diagrams” over the more specific “Maps” to give it even more leeway, and it takes full advantage. Joseph Beuys’ How the Dictatorship of the Parties Can Be Overcome, a schematic drawing on a plastic bag dangling mid-gallery, draws up a poetic social psychogeography — how the artist, a legendary German proto-conceptualist, imagined a practical integration of art and life. It might have served as the exhibition’s touchstone, but instead reveals its core confusion, with so much data-intensive research all around.

And I almost missed W.E.B. Dubois’ charts and graphs made for the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris on the state of Black life in America. DuBois, a Black sociologist and the author of the seminal tome on African-American life The Souls of Black Folk, looked to make a scientific study of “Negro progress” — levels of education, property ownership, among other things — one generation removed from slavery. The elegant drawings that resukt are data-driven but display a care and gravity that grounds them in compassion.

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They’re conspicuous, and for that reason, though they share a frame of mind with the most compelling thing here. It’s — wait for it — a map, conventional-seeming until viewed up close. The familiar boundaries of Canada span sea to sea, filled in-between with words. It’s called Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada, and God bless its straightforwardness: Over years, Margaret Pearce collaborated with dozens of Indigenous groups to resurrect traditional names for places nationwide (my local favourites: ‘At where it is heard approaching,’ somewhere north of what we call Huntsville, or ‘Place of calling silvery waters’ near the Kawarthas).

It remakes the familiar into something glorious and new, saying so clearly what so much else here is straining to articulate: Land is power, and its surface only tells one tale. Scratch it just a little and see what’s underneath.

Diagrams of Power continues at OCAD OnSite Gallery until Sept. 30. For more information please see ocadu.ca/gallery

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